


Don't You Ever Tame Your Demons

by LittlePageAndBird



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Darillium, F/M, Nightmares, Poor River, married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25168828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittlePageAndBird/pseuds/LittlePageAndBird
Summary: Coffee. She needs coffee, lots of it. She’s not taking any chances.She can hardly leave him a note in lipstick and sneak back to Stormcage for a kip, after all. Those days are behind them now, the days where they leave each other, and she really should be happy about that. But now their first month on Darillium has gone by so quickly and she’s starting to panic because she really didn’t think this through.
Relationships: The Doctor/River Song, Twelfth Doctor/River Song
Comments: 11
Kudos: 115





	Don't You Ever Tame Your Demons

**Author's Note:**

> In which River's past comes back to haunt her. Title from Hozier's "Arsonist's Lullabye". Enjoy x

River can get about halfway through her husband’s embellished recital of the time he and her parents ended up aboard a pirate ship before every yawn she’s suppressed over the course of the evening all seem to come at once.

“Heard this one before?” the Doctor asks with a dry smile.

She snaps her mouth shut and blinks herself back to life. “Sorry, sweetie. Go on.”

She has heard it before, as it happens, but he has a new voice now and she could listen to it all day. That’s not the problem.

She forces herself to count every flowerhead she can see in their garden under the moonlight as he rambles. She gets about halfway through mentally reciting their native planets and optimal growing conditions before her head begins to swim. 

Coffee. She needs coffee, lots of it. She’s not taking any chances.

She can hardly leave him a note in lipstick and sneak back to Stormcage for a kip, after all. Those days are behind them now, the days where they leave each other, and she really should be happy about that. But now their first month on Darillium has gone by so quickly and she’s starting to panic because she really didn’t think this through.

She shuffles along the wooden loveseat to cuddle into him when the night air nips at her cheeks and oh, he’s so warm. Another yawn overcomes her, and she twists her head to stifle it against his shoulder.

“Tired?” he asks, kissing her temple absent-mindedly. 

She stays with her nose nestled in his red velvet, wincing at the way the simple question sends a pulse of panic running through her like electric. At least it wakes her up a little.

“No,” she manages, trying to massage colour into the grey half-moons under her eyes.

“Really? It’s been nearly a month.”

“Nah.” She looks to the monoliths on the horizon hopefully. “How long do you think it would take to scale one of those?”

“One of the Towers?” he asks incredulously. 

“I bet the views would be spectacular.” It’s not a complete ruse; she has always loved the idea of seeing the crystal caves up close, where the music is made.

“River,” he admonishes. “They’re sacred ground! We’d be arrested on the spot. If we didn’t plummet to early graves.”

She sulks privately as he robs her of her fantasies about having a nice, long nap alone in a cell. She could almost certainly flirt him into compliance - he doesn’t know it, but he’s always just a few well-placed kisses away from a bit of recreational law-breaking - but she’s far too tired for that. She’s fast running out of avenues here.

She props her chin in her hand as he scolds her, and instantly it’s a mistake but one she doesn’t have the energy to fight. She melts into it, her eyes fluttering shut until her elbow slips off the arm of the bench and forces her upright with a jolt.

“River?” she hears, soft and sweet even though she knows that he’s almost certainly been dying to ask her what the hell the matter is for days now. His worried face blurs at the edges when she looks up at him.

She can’t do this for much longer. Even the Doctor looks a bit foggy-headed, and she’s certain he needs less rest than she does. He’s even caught naps here and there during the past three weeks, nodding off as he read a book with his head in her lap, or with his cheek pillowed on her chest in a warm bath as she’d recited constellation names to keep herself awake. 

He nudges her. “Come on. Let’s get you to bed.”

It’s worth one last-ditch attempt. “Oh, and _there’s_ the perfect sentence.”

He fights down a smirk. “To _sleep_ , dear.”

“Aw.” She pouts. “You ruined it.”

He raises an eyebrow when she stifles another yawn just thinking about snuggling up in their bed. “I know you have that whole terrifyingly impressive thing going on, but even you have to get some shuteye at some point in the next two-and-a-half decades.” He tilts his head, his voice softening. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“I can’t,” she whispers helplessly.

“What? You can’t sleep?”

She sighs, fidgeting under his gaze. “It’s nothing. I just - I probably have a touch of insomnia, that’s all.” She shrugs off her lie with ease, smiling tightly. “I’ve always struggled to get to sleep.”

“Ah.” He winces. “My last body had that. This one loves a nap, though.”

She smiles, raising her eyebrows. “I noticed. On both counts.”

He springs up off the bench, holding out his hand. “Come on! You’ll nod off in no time.”

She has little choice but to follow him into their cottage, and she gets her pyjamas on and climbs under the covers and tells herself that Time Lords typically don’t sleep for very long, all she has to do is lie still next to him for a few hours and appear refreshed in the morning. Which sounds easy enough except when she kisses him goodnight and flips onto her side, he takes it upon himself to be the big spoon and the room swirls as her eyes all but roll back into her head.

She’s done for. If she makes it through tonight she’ll pass out within a matter of days which will be just as bad, if not worse with the added headache of him fussing over her and prodding away at the one thing she’s just about managed, for two hundred years, to hide from him.

Perhaps she’s being paranoid. She can’t imagine anything bad ever happening to her as she lies here, drifting off before she can stop herself, warm and cosier than she’d ever thought possible and so, _so_ tired.

Maybe, she tells herself with her last conscious thought, with the soft hum of the Towers, in her very own home, with the Doctor next to her. Maybe it would be different here.

  
  


“River.”

A voice cuts through to her, sounding miles and miles away. It interrupts, she doesn’t know what - doesn’t know when or where she was before this - but it disrupts something, jolts something inside her.

“River.”

Again, and she knows it from somewhere, she can’t remember how, but she knows somehow that it doesn’t sound like it should. She looks for it but she has no eyes, no face, everything is pitch dark. 

“Come on, dear. I know you’re in there. Listen to me. You’re stronger than it. It doesn’t control you. Wake up.”

Dreaming. She’s dreaming. The sudden clarity pulls at her like a thread until she unravels, slowly growing aware of herself again. Her head is hot and tingling and as the sludgy blackness of the nightmare she can't quite remember melts away she finds herself out of bed, standing in the middle of the living room in the dark. 

Her husband is standing at the other end of the room, his eyes fixed on her as he calls her name ever so softly and she frowns at him, doesn’t notice, can’t feel her body for a moment. And then she sees her hand outstretched before her and her alpha meson pistol, her finger poised on the trigger, the barrel pointed at his face.

She drops the gun with a yelp like it’s molten in her hand and staggers away from him. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ -”

“River, it’s ok. It’s ok,” the Doctor soothes, stretching a hand out towards her as she keeps pedalling backwards until her back hits the wall and keeps herself pressed to it, where she can’t hurt him. “You’re safe.”

Her hearts thump wildly in her chest, and she swallows down a wave of sickness. “What did I do?”

He hesitates. “You weren’t in control-”

“I need to know. Tell me exactly what I did.”

“It wasn’t you-”

“ _Tell me_!”

Her scream rings out in the room. He doesn’t flinch, but he looks at her like it’s painful. “You seemed to be... having a bad dream,” he says eventually. 

“And-?” 

“And when I tried to wake you, you lashed out. That’s all,” he says, a fast, desperate edge to his voice. She searches his eyes through the dark and there’s something wrong, there’s something he’s trying to keep away.

She stretches her arm along the wall and fumbles blindly for the lightswitch.

“River, please don’t-”

She blinks, adjusting her eyes to the chaos around them. The coffee table overturned, books splayed across the floor and photo frames reduced to shards on the carpet. She looks to the Doctor.

He fidgets restlessly on the spot, averting his gaze as he realises he can’t hide from her. There’s a darkening bruise running along his right eye socket, the skin next to his eyebrow swollen and split.

“Oh god,” she croaks.

“It’s _fine_ , River. River?”

She turns on her heel and staggers into the kitchen with her fist pressed to her mouth, ignoring the way he says her name like a plea as he follows her. 

She throws the freezer door open, pulls out a bag of ice and holds it out to him without meeting his eye.

“Thank you,” he whispers sincerely and she flinches at it, watching numbly as he wraps some up into a tea towel and presses it to the blooming red mark on his face. 

“Does it hurt?” she hears herself ask, and of course she knows what the answer is, of course she knows he’ll lie, but maybe she just wants to hear it anyway.

“It’s fine.” He pulls the towel back and notes the spots of blood on it with a carefully unreadable face that makes her want to shake him.

She plants her hands on the bench to stop them shaking. “I-” A sharp ache in her throat tells her she’s starting to cry, and she clenches her jaw until her back teeth grind together. “I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t be.” He shakes his head, dabbing at his bruise. “My fault. All of it,” he reminds her calmly, as if he needs to. “You knew,” he says softly, trying to seek the eye contact she won’t give him. “That’s why you’ve been refusing to sleep since we got here.”

She feels herself sinking. “You noticed.”

“Of course I noticed. It’s happened before?”

“My whole life." She swallows. "Not every night, but enough. Why else do you think I chose to spend all those nights in a locked cell?” She shrugs off his gaze, a horrible burning shame crawling under her skin. All the times she’d let her guard down, nodded off somewhere comfortable, only to wake up miles away with a weapon in her hand and the bodies of strangers at her feet. “At least then the only person I could hurt was myself.”

“River-”

She steels in an instant at the way he says her name like it’s an apology. “Don’t you dare.”

“What?”

“Use this as another thing to add to that bloody guilt complex you have about me,” she spits. “I don’t need your pity.”

“I don’t - I don’t pity you,” he stumbles. “I want to help you.”

She scoffs under her breath. “Out of obligation.”

“I’m your husband,” he counters, like he’s not just proving her point. “It’s my job to fix things for you-”

“You can’t _fix_ me!” she yells suddenly. “You wanted so badly to know who I was all those years, Doctor? Well, this is me! Mystery solved!” She gestures at herself furiously, all trembling hands and dark shadows. “What do you think?” she asks bitterly. “Am I still _exciting_?”

He looks at her like she’s the one who’s bleeding, but she’s too tired and too disgusted at herself to bother hiding it now. None of it matters anyway. It’s barely been a month, and it’s ruined. She’s broken it.

She storms past him and goes around the living room setting the furniture right so she’s too preoccupied to burst into tears, dimly aware of him pattering after her. 

“I didn’t mean-” He sighs shortly and cuts himself off as he piles the books back onto the coffee table, the way he does when he can’t quite make what’s in his head come out of his mouth. “You don’t need fixing, River. But there must be something we can do.” He nudges the gun on the floor with his toe. “Taking the weapons out of the house, for a start.”

“That won’t matter. If my mind is set on killing you in an empty room, then I will.” She laughs grimly as she scoops the gun up by the barrel. “My training was impeccable.”

“You won’t hurt me.”

“I just did!” She waves the gun in her hand without thinking, and the tiniest flash in his eyes leaves her reeling. She lays it down carefully on the table and steps back until she’s further from it than he is, folding her arms tightly across her chest. “Next time you might not be so lucky.”

“You won’t hurt me,” he repeats, like he truly believes it.

“You can’t possibly know that. _I_ can’t.” She sinks onto the sofa, rubbing her hands across her face. “You should sleep in the Tardis from now on,” she mumbles wearily when he takes the armchair opposite her. “Keep it locked. Or I’ll sleep in the Tardis, and you can have-”

“No.”

She lifts her head out of her hands and glares at him. “Yes.”

“ _No_.” He still looks at her like she’s broken bones for him all over again, but there’s a fierceness there that takes her aback. “I’m not spending the next twenty-four years sleeping apart from you, River. We’ve been apart far too much in our lives; this time is about being together.”

“We can’t be together if you’re dead!”

“You wouldn’t _kill_ me,” he dismisses. “At worst I’d regenerate, and I’ve got regenerations coming out of my ears now, so it’s-”

“Is this a joke to you?” she snaps. “Do you even understand what I am, Doctor? What I’ve done, what I’m capable of?”

He doesn’t blink at the vicious edge to her voice. “I understand you.”

“That’s not what I asked.” She drags a hand through her hair. “All these years trying to get away from my conditioning. And it’s still just right under the surface.”

“River-”

“This isn’t up for discussion, do you hear me? I will not allow myself to harm you. Never again.” She swallows. “You can’t trust me.”

“River, look at me.”

He says it in a way that compels her, and when she lifts her head and scowls at him she could swear he looks nervous.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he says, his voice wavering just enough for her notice.

She sighs, resting her forehead in her hand and closing her eyes. There’s no poetry he can conjure up to undo this or make her forget, ever, how close her finger had felt to pulling that trigger.

She doesn’t realise he’s kneeling beside her until his fingers tuck her curls back and then his mouth is against her ear, whispering something that she doesn’t quite understand.

She lifts her head and searches his face, flicking through all the languages she knows and dismissing them when they ring no bells. She repeats it softly, trying to wrap her tongue around the syllables and he watches her mouth intently, his eyes shining. 

“That’s Gallifreyan,” she realises with faint surprise. “But I don’t recognise it. How does it translate?”

“It doesn’t.”

Her brow furrows at the way he’s looking at her, like he’s waiting for the penny to drop, and she wades through the tired fog in her head. And then her hearts thump against her ribs and she draws back and gapes at him because he wouldn’t, he couldn’t possibly, not to anyone, not ever.

But he has.

“Because it’s a name,” she breathes.

He smiles softly. “Because it’s a name.”

“Doctor.” She wants to tell him off, she really does, but her eyes fill with tears before she can say another word and she swallows, clutching his hand tightly. “Why would you tell me your name?”

“Because I trust you, River. Completely.” He brings her hand up to his lips and kisses the same knuckles that are responsible for the bruise on his face, his eyes trained on her. “Two thousand years. A whole universe. And as of tonight, you are the only person I have ever told.” His throat bobs and his eyebrows knit together as he asks her quietly. “Understand?”

She nods, heavy with the weight of it, and touches her forehead to his. The exhaustion comes back like a tidal wave, and she lets him lift her feet onto the sofa and throw a blanket over her. 

He settles next to her and pulls her gently to lie against him without a word. “Sleep,” he tells her, stroking a hand through her hair. “We’ll be fine.”

The next thing she knows she’s waking up to the smell of coffee and bacon and god, she hates it when he’s right.   
  



End file.
